Mechanism to stop steamrolling?

Auggie12

Just wondering is there going to a mechanism to stop steamrolling? Something like unhappiness in Civ and the Total war series of games? (ie if unhappiness drops too low the city revolts etc)

I just feel like currently once you have a stack of doom u can steamroll all the AI cities leaving them no time to build up any defenses or armies to fight you... does anyone else get into that kind of situation?

There's also a solution around diplomacy: the AI should try to steamroll YOU! If you are steamrolling an AI, it should do all it can to make another AI, closer to you go to war with you (it's dead anyway so it can promise gold, techs, women, whatever...). Because movement is slow now, it's going to make it difficult for the player to defend a second front.

Same thing for when the AI declares war: now it declares war when it's pissed off with your stack of doom being close to its border. But it basically means that your strongest army is close to their cities when they declare, while they are years away of your own cities. The AI should prepare a bit before declaring war: getting some of their unit closer to your cities, preparing to intercept your stack of doom (did anybody see a global spell cast on your stacks BTW? tactical, tons, but global none).

I was thinking the same thing. The AI is playing very poorly which allows easy steamrolling. Part of this seems to be due to how much room there is on the map for expansion. Everyone crammed tightly together at the start with bottlenecks and monsters everywhere.

The AI cities, I took over, had very poor research output too. This possibly explains why I'm not seeing them build good units.

Heck, once I started taking an AI's cities one by one. It didn't even change the build queues to crank out defensive units.

1. Distance to capital. As your empire get larger and larger, the higher the unrest is in relation to your capital. Research, Magic, Garrison, and Infrastructure should help with this.

2. Unrest causes revolts in towns

3. The larger your stack, the slower your movement speed.

4. Allow multiple stacks to engage one stack. Take Mount and Blade's reinforcement system(I'll explain below). This will with out a doubt assist with killing off the stack of doom(Faster stacks can reinforce against slower stacks, but not vise versa)

5. Add a very expensive strategic spell that summons demons/dragons to attack the strongest faction. If the demons capture a city, they then begin to spawn darklings, etc.

6. Severely nerf the god-like weapons and spells so that one hero cannot wipe out an army by himself. (At best, a Hero should be as strong as 2-3X the strongest unit currently buildable by the player)

7. My Split-city idea. This should make larger cities progressively harder to defend as they get larger, by dividing the cities into sections based on tile placements, and each section can be captured individually. See: http://forums.elementalgame.com/420896/page/6

8. Factions can recruit Mercenary[men]/slave[fallen] designs from each other. I.e. if the player has access to far better technology, the enemy AI could hire a limited number of some of the designs from the player to gain access to some of these equipment to even the odds a bit. The player can do the same. Mercs should cost significant amount of gold, and Slaves should cost a resource called [slaves], gained by killing non-monsters.

9. Give a large bonus to Back Attacks. This should prevent a few super heavily armored soldiers to take on hordes of incoming weaker soldiers if they manage to "Flank".

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Reinforcement system explanation.

1. ONLY Faster Stacks can reinforce Adjacent stacks(to the defenders) against slower stacks in both offense and defense. This give some usefulness to cavalry, and smaller stacks, as to discourage stacks of doom.

2. Slower stacks cannot reinforce any stacks against a faster stack attack. This not only discourages bigger stacks, but also gives some advantage to a more maneuverable, lightly armored force.

3. Reinforcement works by, calculating ratio between Attacker and Defenders. If say there are 18 [A]ttackers and 9 [D]efenders, then the battle will have a maximum of 9 attackers, and 5 defenders, as well as starting with that many. Either side can call reinforcements during the battle from the pool that didn't make it to the initial fight until they reach the max.[9 attacker, 5 defenders].

This should allow the strategy of overwhelming numbers to actually work, also too would the strategy to funnel enemy stacks into a thinner pathway to minimize the effects of overwhelming numbers.

10, Don't switch the ZoC immediatelly. Make it so that, for a few turns depending on the infrastructure and level of the city, you're still in a hostile environment. The defender, then, has a chance to retake the city fighting with the domestic bonuses. Can also port (forgot the spell name), right there, since it's still their territory. Also the defender doesn't lose their resources in the ZoC, if any.

I actually don't like the "unrest" idea, or a revolt idea, because they both seem a bit... hard to notice. That was actually something I disliked in Civ games. I felt like a dog with a shock collar + invisible fence on a 1 hour delay.

Besides, an economic hampering may not even make a difference so long as games continue to be determined by champions alone. I mean, I don't really need any "steam" to help with my roll.

I'd prefer something less subtle to stop steamrolling, and there might be lots of lore to help with that. I've heard there are random events, but haven't seen much of them. Maybe the chance for negative/position random events could increase relative to their ranking compared to the AI?

Maybe we can make unrest more noticeable? Like people walking around the towns in protest if the city is on the verge of revolts + icons in the city management screen showing unrest as red?

+ Captured cities give an Occupation unrest penalty if you arent the player that founded them. This starts at +50 Unrest, and after 20 turns begins to drop 1 per turn until it hits +25 where it stays. A player never has an occupation penalty from a city he founded (if he retakes it)

This will certainly prevent players who capture a city from gaining an immediate boost to their economy anyway. It also makes captured cities worse then ones you built yourself which gives you an incentive to raze captured cities and lowers the huge boost capturing a city gave to your economy, which was out of whack with how hard it was to grow a city.

+ Captured cities give an Occupation unrest penalty if you arent the player that founded them. This starts at +50 Unrest, and after 20 turns begins to drop 1 per turn until it hits +25 where it stays. A player never has an occupation penalty from a city he founded (if he retakes it)

This will certainly prevent players who capture a city from gaining an immediate boost to their economy anyway. It also makes captured cities worse then ones you built yourself which gives you an incentive to raze captured cities and lowers the huge boost capturing a city gave to your economy, which was out of whack with how hard it was to grow a city.

I actually don't like the "unrest" idea, or a revolt idea, because they both seem a bit... hard to notice. That was actually something I disliked in Civ games. I felt like a dog with a shock collar + invisible fence on a 1 hour delay.

Besides, an economic hampering may not even make a difference so long as games continue to be determined by champions alone. I mean, I don't really need any "steam" to help with my roll.

I'd prefer something less subtle to stop steamrolling, and there might be lots of lore to help with that. I've heard there are random events, but haven't seen much of them. Maybe the chance for negative/position random events could increase relative to their ranking compared to the AI?

After playing many of these types of games I think an affective way to slow down the steam rolling is with having walled cities such as in AOW:SM and Total War that you need special equitment/ and or abilities to get past. And yes this should show in Tactical combat as well. Couple this with militia and buildings like Towers that shoot all matters of projectiles and a way to upgrade walls and gates both through mundain (wood to stone) and magical means. This of course would involve the player to build up his city defense, no city should have these from the start with the exception of militia.

Not only would this make for fun city battles in TC. But also slow the steamrolling of cities. Yes you could build that stack with abilities to by pass the walls but it would take you longer to get them.

Plus I never liked the unrest mechanic that CIV has. I do want unrest in the game but this should only last a few rounds.

Quoting Sythion, reply 24I actually don't like the "unrest" idea, or a revolt idea, because they both seem a bit... hard to notice. That was actually something I disliked in Civ games. I felt like a dog with a shock collar + invisible fence on a 1 hour delay.

Besides, an economic hampering may not even make a difference so long as games continue to be determined by champions alone. I mean, I don't really need any "steam" to help with my roll.

I'd prefer something less subtle to stop steamrolling, and there might be lots of lore to help with that. I've heard there are random events, but haven't seen much of them. Maybe the chance for negative/position random events could increase relative to their ranking compared to the AI?

After playing many of these types of games I think an affective way to slow down the steam rolling is with having walled cities such as in AOW:SM and Total War that you need special equitment/ and or abilities to get past. And yes this should show in Tactical combat as well. Couple this with militia and buildings like Towers that shoot all matters of projectiles and a way to upgrade walls and gates both through mundain (wood to stone) and magical means. This of course would involve the player to build up his city defense, no city should have these from the start with the exception of militia.

Not only would this make for fun city battles in TC. But also slow the steamrolling of cities. Yes you could build that stack with abilities to by pass the walls but it would take you longer to get them.

Plus I never liked the unrest mechanic that CIV has. I do want unrest in the game but this should only last a few rounds.

Quoting Sythion, reply 24I actually don't like the "unrest" idea, or a revolt idea, because they both seem a bit... hard to notice. That was actually something I disliked in Civ games. I felt like a dog with a shock collar + invisible fence on a 1 hour delay.

Besides, an economic hampering may not even make a difference so long as games continue to be determined by champions alone. I mean, I don't really need any "steam" to help with my roll.

I'd prefer something less subtle to stop steamrolling, and there might be lots of lore to help with that. I've heard there are random events, but haven't seen much of them. Maybe the chance for negative/position random events could increase relative to their ranking compared to the AI?

After playing many of these types of games I think an affective way to slow down the steam rolling is with having walled cities such as in AOW:SM and Total War that you need special equitment/ and or abilities to get past. And yes this should show in Tactical combat as well. Couple this with militia and buildings like Towers that shoot all matters of projectiles and a way to upgrade walls and gates both through mundain (wood to stone) and magical means. This of course would involve the player to build up his city defense, no city should have these from the start with the exception of militia.

Not only would this make for fun city battles in TC. But also slow the steamrolling of cities. Yes you could build that stack with abilities to by pass the walls but it would take you longer to get them.

Plus I never liked the unrest mechanic that CIV has. I do want unrest in the game but this should only last a few rounds.

Maybe a combination of both unrest and walled cities...

But wouldn't having walled cities make monsters useless?

Not at all depending on thier skills/equitment. And you could like in AOW:SM be able to have any unit break down gates. Gates would have so many hit points which the attack would have to damage before getting in. They would have to have an ability Wall Breaking in order to do damage to walls. Catapults would automatically have wall smashing.

Quoting Sythion, reply 24I actually don't like the "unrest" idea, or a revolt idea, because they both seem a bit... hard to notice. That was actually something I disliked in Civ games. I felt like a dog with a shock collar + invisible fence on a 1 hour delay.

Besides, an economic hampering may not even make a difference so long as games continue to be determined by champions alone. I mean, I don't really need any "steam" to help with my roll.

I'd prefer something less subtle to stop steamrolling, and there might be lots of lore to help with that. I've heard there are random events, but haven't seen much of them. Maybe the chance for negative/position random events could increase relative to their ranking compared to the AI?

After playing many of these types of games I think an affective way to slow down the steam rolling is with having walled cities such as in AOW:SM and Total War that you need special equitment/ and or abilities to get past. And yes this should show in Tactical combat as well. Couple this with militia and buildings like Towers that shoot all matters of projectiles and a way to upgrade walls and gates both through mundain (wood to stone) and magical means. This of course would involve the player to build up his city defense, no city should have these from the start with the exception of militia.

Not only would this make for fun city battles in TC. But also slow the steamrolling of cities. Yes you could build that stack with abilities to by pass the walls but it would take you longer to get them.

Plus I never liked the unrest mechanic that CIV has. I do want unrest in the game but this should only last a few rounds.

Maybe a combination of both unrest and walled cities...

But wouldn't having walled cities make monsters useless?

Not at all depending on thier skills/equitment. And you could like in AOW:SM be able to have any unit break down gates. Gates would have so many hit points which the attack would have to damage before getting in. They would have to have an ability Wall Breaking in order to do damage to walls. Catapults would automatically have wall smashing.

This worked very well in AOW:SM

This is exactly what I was thinking is a missing element from the game. There is a crazy amount of offensive power at the hands of the player but there is not a whole lot going on in the defensive aspects of the game. Making it hard ( as it should be ) to take a fortified city should slow the player down some.

I agree with all the points Das123 made. And also, possibly, use seanw3's suggestions for different levels of cities and armor/weapon makeup of city militia (that he uses in his mods), including city archer militia.

There is another problem fundamental to the way this game is made. And that is, a full stack of superior troops would simply steamroll through numerous full stacks of inferior troops.

This problem is caused by the limit to how many troops can be in one stack.

No matter how you reduce the level gain, or increase defence bonuses (this would compound the problem if defenders are the superior stack)

A reinforcement system similar to Mount and Blade would be the best to alleviate this.

In Mount and Blade, if the system was identical to that of Fallen Enchnatress, then say a max Army size of 20, then no matter how many armies the enemy has, so long as they are of a significant inferior quality, the superior single army will destroy everything simply because the numbers aren't given any advantage.

If AI factions would meet enemy hero-led armies on their territory with a barrage of overland spells then steamrolling would end quickly. However, at the moment an army can use roads to cross an entire ZOC inside of one turn, leaving no scope for defensive maneuvers. A building or spell that slows enemies down will help here.

If AI factions would meet enemy hero-led armies on their territory with a barrage of overland spells then steamrolling would end quickly. However, at the moment an army can use roads to cross an entire ZOC inside of one turn, leaving no scope for defensive maneuvers. A building or spell that slows enemies down will help here.

That is a terrible way to solve the problem. The reason being that it gives the player absolutely no control over the units while they die, simply by being pummeled by the fist of "god".

in civ futher you where from your captial more un happy people where also that kept empires civs from branch out all over the place making taking over capture citys all time not worth while becuase futhere you got more unhappy they where also if they civs where not of your people they also where unhappy, making it possiable for citys that where captured to turn back to there orginal owner unless you had alot of troops to supress it and i mean alot of resrouces had to go into doing that.

it would help with steam rolling also in civ 5 when someone started warmongering then every one would pretty hate them just becuase they would worry about being the next one took over, in this game dosnt seem like any one cares if you steam rolling every one in game.

Replicator i wold agrre with you if the ai managed its mana better and kept a portion of it back at all times to microwave its opponents, but it isn't even doing it once or twice. You have a spell that will lower initiave before a fight starts, and a spell that will slow world map movement speed and a spell that will divide up a stack and toss it around the world map a bit, and a spell that deal raw damage. i never see the ai use these spells. it uses city enchantments, but not other spells in this regard.

If the ai could manage its army better, slow you down, burn you up and chill your bones before engaing you in battle, that would rock.

It would rock... the first time you face it... then you start sending in fodder to waste all of its mana before your real army arrives... and then it's right back to normal again.

The 2 biggest thing in my mind that needs to be changed:

1) Roads, the bonus to movement effect shouldn't apply unless it's on your territory, heck, improve the bonus inside your territory. This prevents you from rushing a city before they can even react, while allowing the defenders to gather quicker.

2) Base HP of units should increase, lower HP increase per level. This makes high level units (that you've been training) less like unkillable HP stacks of doom, while making rookie defenders a bit more beefy so that they might be able to kill something.

If you can just do that, you should lower the steamrolling quite a bit.

Replicator i wold agrre with you if the ai managed its mana better and kept a portion of it back at all times to microwave its opponents, but it isn't even doing it once or twice. You have a spell that will lower initiave before a fight starts, and a spell that will slow world map movement speed and a spell that will divide up a stack and toss it around the world map a bit, and a spell that deal raw damage. i never see the ai use these spells. it uses city enchantments, but not other spells in this regard.

If the ai could manage its army better, slow you down, burn you up and chill your bones before engaing you in battle, that would rock.

I'll put it this way. Losing troops to events that are beyond your control is by far the most annoying aspect of a game, to me.

From disease in Total War games to nukes in Starcraft or Rise of nations.

i look at the patterns i use when i play, ,i think about ho i can use this spell or that trait, then i would hope that brad does the sme thing and program the ai to do it too. If you don't want the ai to microwave you, dont have the spell in the game. Mind you, there are very loose restrictions on how many times you can cast a spell per round which i find very unnerving and pray the ai never starts to abuse. Kind of like a theoretical pulse cannon pointed at someones head, you dont know when its going to recharge

(MAN i HATE this keyboard the buttons stick and its makin me glook illiterate)

It would rock... the first time you face it... then you start sending in fodder to waste all of its mana before your real army arrives... and then it's right back to normal again.

Nah, that's why i wrote "enemy hero-led armies on their territory". That might weaken or slow said armies just enough in order for the tactical battle not to be a pushover.

And naturally a large mana supply would lead to swift annihilation of the player's army, which might not be fun. That is why similar games always have a "casting power" stat, which determines how much mana a side can expend per turn.